1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to techniques for visualization of search engine output as a means for assisting the user in selecting relevant search results, and to a graphical user interface for displaying search results of search engines.
2. Description of the Related Art
The World Wide Web (“web”) contains a vast amount of information. Locating a desired portion of the information, however, can be challenging. This problem is compounded because the amount of information on the web and the number of new users inexperienced at web searching are growing rapidly.
Search engines attempt to return hyperlinks that point to web pages in which a user is interested. Generally, search engines base their determination of the user's interest on search terms (called a “search query”) entered by the user. The goal of the search engine is to provide links, based on the search query, to high quality, relevant results to the user. Typically, a conventional search engine accomplishes this by matching the terms in the search query to a set of pre-stored web pages. Web pages that contain the user's search terms are “hits” and are returned to the user.
To build complex queries, a query language can be used. Almost every search engine uses such a language, and with the help of logical (Boolean) operations, a user can point out the words that need to be present (or absent) in the required document, show how far apart they can be from each other, enumerate synonyms, and identify possible unwanted words in the required document. Unfortunately that language requires special knowledge, and a change in the usual approach of most lay users, which makes the language practically inaccessible for most users. Therefore, all search engines use an extra page, hidden “behind” the main search page.
Conventional search engines also use the standard concept of a command line to type in a query, and return a number of hyperlinks as the search result.
One of the problems in modern search engine development is being able to present information to the user in the most intuitive manner. Currently, conventional systems, in response to a user query, display a list of links to websites that the search engine considers relevant in some sense. Generally, the ordering of the links in the display is indicative of greater or lesser relevance of the particular search result, based on some algorithm utilized by the search engine to assess the relevance of a particular webpage. Also, conventional search engines can display small excerpts from the text on the websites, typically the text that is found close to the query terms. This assists the user in quickly estimating whether the text (and, presumably, the entire website to which the hyperlink points) is more or less relevant to the search results he is seeking.
One difficulty with this approach is the considerable burden placed on the user in having to read what may be a significant amount of text—in other words, placing an obstacle between the results that the user is seeking, and the amount of mental effort needed to sort through the results provided by the search engine. Even in the case where the most relevant search result is close to the top of the ranking, nonetheless, some effort and time by the user is necessary, if only to “digest” the text of the annotations provided by the search engine.
Recently, some search engines (e.g., Yandex) have begun placing small graphical elements next to each search result. This is possible because the latest versions of the browsers now support displays of what is called “favorite icons,” which is a small graphical image displayed next to the address when the website is accessed. For example, when accessing Google, a graphical “G” appears to the left of the URL. The format of these “favorite icons” is standardized, and increasingly, more and more websites provide for such favorite icons, as yet another mechanism for displaying brand information to the user. It should be noted, of course, that not all search engine websites have such favorite icons, nonetheless, the practice is becoming increasingly prevalent, particularly for websites operated by commercial enterprises.
Nevertheless, the problem of displaying search results in a manner that is intuitive and easy for the user to navigate remains. The overriding goal of a search engine is to return the most desirable set of links for any particular search query. Accordingly, there is a need in the art for an effective and efficient system and method for presenting search results and search context as an aid to context-based searching.